Novel Dreams

Another weird tendency I have noted in my dreams: if I happen to fall asleep for an early evening nap, I often dream that I am writing a novel. Once it was a mystery story. Tonight it evolved into the story of two baseball-playing friends during the Depression. It is both a dream, as I experience the story, and a story, as I write the sentences to describe it--and generally, I am very satisfied with the words I come up with (something I have had to spend decades learning in real life: not to let my internal critic inhibit me from writing anything.)

It's weird because I have little or no urge in waking life to write fiction. But it must be there, because I can almost taste the desire, the necessity of writing the novel, as I do it: the sense of satisfaction, of joy, of doing good work, is unmatched in what I can remember from other dreams.

"Very strange."

Postscript: combining my thoughts on dreams in a previous entry and the recent Orwell piece, I suppose if I had written Nineteen Eighty-Four I would have said,

"Winston woke with the word 'Devine' on his lips."